By now you’ve probably read accounts of last weekend’s weather-related airline delays, most of which affected US Airways. But what does the airline have to say about the incident? In an internal memo from US Airways’ CEO Doug Parker to employees, the carrier analyzes the event and draws a few interesting conclusions.
As is my policy, I’m running the memo without comment and unedited:
This weekend, an ice storm moved through the Northeast and had a significant impact on all airline operations, including ours. At one point, US Airways had more than 100,000 misconnected customers as the storm shut down runways at PHL, BOS, EWR and elsewhere. We cancelled about 1,500 flights on Friday alone (462 mainline and 1,038 Express); on Saturday, we cancelled another 823 mainline and Express flights. And Sunday, we had cancelled another 200 flights.
When you consider the load factor booked on most of these flights was north of 85 percent, you can quickly see just how devastating this past weekend was for our customers, as well as our frontline employees. We also had loads for the next several days that were forecast over 90% which meant that we simply didn’t have enough seats in the system to reaccomodate all of the customers from the cancelled flights.
Over the two days, I’ve heard from many of you wondering why our operation was so challenging this past weekend. While not everyone might want the degree of detail outlined here, I think you all deserve to know exactly what happened this past weekend and what we are doing to recover.
A Perfect Storm (of ice pellets, high loads and treacherous travel conditions)
The difficulties began Friday when a predicted “wintry mix” storm quickly became something far worse. Although forecast to be light snow, what happened instead was a small 20-mile wide band of operationally devastating weather that moved from southwest to northeast right over the top of Philadelphia and New York. Airports south of this narrow band had rain and could stay open and airports north of this narrow band had snow and could also stay open. Only in the narrow band of ice pellets were aircraft prohibited from taking off. Normally, the storm would move and the ice would turn to either snow or rain which would allow takeoffs to resume and in fact, that’s what our weather forecasts continued to predict. This one, however, stayed over PHL all day and as a result, PHL was closed for takeoffs from 10am through the rest of the day.
While our operations team kept expecting a change to either rain or snow (either of which we could safely operate in), the ice continued and we ended up saturated in PHL.
With PHL closed, we were forced to cancel hundreds of flights, or divert flights from Northeast cities in to our hub at Charlotte, NC. We had similar icing problems at the Shuttle cities and at PIT. These cancellations and diversions, of course left many airplanes and crews “out of position” and many employees driving to some of these airports had a rough time given the treacherous road conditions.
Although not any solace to our customers; we weren’t alone with the weather challenges. Other airlines had similar challenges and because we are in the middle of spring break travel, there were few options for re-accommodation on any airline (remember the 90 plus load factors for several days in a row). We were getting requests from other airlines for assistance and we were doing our share of asking for seats too. And once passengers ended up in one of the hubs, notably PHL and CLT, there wasn’t much choice but to wait in line to rebook.
Because we had over 100,000 customers to reaccomodate, reservations had very long hold times, the airports had really long lines, and patience, understandably, grew thin. Hotels were completely full in many cities, so customers spent the night in the airport on cots, and in some cases, they spent more than one night in the airport.
Digging Out
As the weekend progressed, our employees worked double- and triple-time to bring extra flights to Charlotte and other cities to get customers where they needed to be. We offered refunds and future flight vouchers to customers who could travel later. Crewmembers came in on their days off to staff flights. Specifically, we flew extra sections from CLT to Miami, Orlando and Buffalo; on Sunday; we flew an extra section from PHL to Aruba.
Our employees worked with local airports to bring cots and food to our customers who could not get into overflowing hotels. We opened our clubs to elderly customers and families with small children.
By Sunday afternoon, we were making progress. Lines at CLT – which on Saturday numbered close to 2,000 customers – were down to several hundred by Sunday afternoon. Philadelphia and other Northeast cities’ lines were down to levels comparable to a heavy holiday travel weekend, a major improvement from just 24 hours earlier.
Week Ahead
So just when Res migration and an ice pellet storm end, many employees wonder what’s next. High loads due to spring break remain, but hopefully, we’ll operate under much more cooperative weather. In addition, while still tight, crew staffing is recovering and we believe we will be staffed to run the full operation Monday morning. The load factor estimates for the week ahead are listed below:
Monday – ML 85.5%, EX 79.7%
Tuesday – ML 77.8% EX, 71.1%
Wednesday – ML 81.0%, EX 74.7%
Thursday – ML 86.5%, EX 80.0%
Friday – ML 89%, EX 83%
Saturday – 90+%
Sunday – 87.1%
To say this past weekend was frustrating to our frontline employees, particularly coming after two tough weeks following Res migration, is an understatement. To simply say “thank you” at this point rings hollow, and more hat tricks and cookouts seem trite. I know that this weekend was very difficult for our customers and employees, particularly coming on the heels of Res migration. We were caught by a storm that closed PHL and other Northeast station and because of Spring Break loads, it has taken us days to recover and made for a very difficult work environment.
We didn’t deliver that this weekend, and we haven’t delivered that for the past few weeks. That must change and it will. Recognize this is due to no fault of our frontline employees and to be clear, our operations team did the best they could with the information they had to work with.
In closing, I realize I’ve provided a lot more detail about an irregular ops weekend than normal. But this past weekend was anything but normal and coming on the heels of Res migration, I felt you all deserved to know as much as possible about what went wrong this past weekend, as well as where we are right now.
If you worked the frontlines over the weekend, please accept — again — my humble and personal thanks for all that you endured and did to help our customers. Please know that we are doing everything in our power to resume normal operations as quickly as we can. Thank you for all you’re doing to assist that effort.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Well I’ll comment. NEVER in all of my years traveling have I witnessed such a uncaring attitude from a company.
You go to the company internal publications and you see the western half of the company having parties and cookouts while their coworkers in the east suffer with a balky non functioning reservations systems. Did Dougie tell ya that some Kiosks were down further delaying customers. Never once do you see the liars from US admit that little slice of heaven.
Or that their Res system won’t do rule 240 re-routes and they have to physically call other airlines and that the employees have been instructed NOT to honor their own Contract of Carriage as far as rule 240 is concerned.
Anyone who was caught up in this that doesn’t file a DOT complaint is being nothing more than a lamb being led to slaughter.
My wife, along with her ski club, had an 8-day ski trip in Utah that culminated with a return fligh on Delta, Salt Lake City to Newark, on Saturday March 17 departing at 10 am. They left the resort on time and their bus dropped them off in front of the airport a full two hours before their flight. When they opened the doors to go in, they were faced with a wall of people, all lined up to get to the check-in counters. They could barely get into the building as packed as it was. There was no hope of getting anywhere near the check-in counters to get checked in on time. As they had reservations, they found the check-in kiosks and lined up to use these. They were checking in one-by-one, when the system stopped accepting any further check ins. Less than half of the 45-member group had their boarding passes with no recourse for the remainder. By the time the group had made it to the check-in counters, the Delta rep told them they were too late checking in and their seats had been given away. Consequently, the next available seats for them were on Tuesday (a full 3 days later!) and they were not entitled to any free vouchers for anything.
How is such a situation possible?
I can’t vouch for how the airlines handled the situation (I don’t work for an airline either), but I can vouch for the nasty weather. I live in NJ, halfway between Philly and New York, and that storm really made things awful. The sleet and frozen rain fell all day, and I wound up having to chop about 1-2 inches of ice off my driveway just so I could get in and out. One of the TV commentators I saw was berating the airports for not having enough de-icing fluid, but once you got the ice off, it iced back up in no time. They could have sprayed the same plane all day and it wouldn’t have made much difference.
There is more here than meets the eye. As a moderately savvy traveler, I was watching the FAA’s National Airspace System Status Summary throughout the day, and I documented this bit of information on my blog (http://dltj.org/2007/05/usairways-no-more/
The only abnormality was an odd message on the National Airspace System Status Summary was a message that the Philadelphia airport was closed to U.S. Airways traffic at the request of the airline due to “lack of ramp space.”
How I wish I had a screen capture of that message. It went on to say that the FAA was not to be held responsible for this closure and that it only affected U.S. Airways flights.
Something else was happening that weekend…